When I moved in with my grandmother, I finally had three meals a day.

Breakfast was usually Cheerios and canned fruit like peaches, cherries, and pears.

I didn’t like it.

It’s amusing to me that I had the nerve to be picky after years of food shortage. But compared with Captain Crunch and Lucky Charms… the one thing I could almost guarantee would be in my dad’s kitchen… it lacked…

Sugar.

Lunch was also bland. I watched friends open Doritos, Oreos, and fruit snacks at lunch while I had graham crackers and more fruit… or worse. Lemon cookies. Yuck. But… I was fed.

Grandma was especially good at cooking three things and not much else, in my opinion: freshly popped popcorn in butter, pizza fritz (which was raw dough fried in oil and then covered in confectioners’ sugar), and a pancake breakfast complete with fried eggs, juicy sausage, and sometimes fried cannellini beans.

She also made other things that were ok. Hot dog and ground beef pizza was better than the black olive and pineapple pizza at my dad’s. And she made goulash.

I remember hating Thanksgiving, though. Unheard of, right? Not for me.

I dreaded Thanksgiving. Although she was Italian, Grandma wasn’t a great cook. She didn’t use enough seasoning. She would make a dry turkey and a side of potatoes and carrots that tasted more boiled than baked. There would be green beans, too, but they didn’t have much flavor and seemed undercooked.

The stuffing was ok. I think she used the stuffing mix that came pre-seasoned. That probably helped. She made homemade gravy, and it was decent.

I confess I actually loved the appetizers… meats, cheeses, and crackers. Shrimp cocktail. Olives and pickles. That was my favorite.

But the Thanksgiving spread, as criminal as it was. wasn’t why I hated Thanksgiving… it’s what came after.

For what felt like months, we would eat leftovers. How does one keep turkey unspoiled for months? I’ll tell you.

As soon as Thanksgiving was done, Grandma would carve up the turkey and put it in water. Bones, too. She would add in the carrots and potatoes and whatever else she had, add (not enough) salt and pepper, and then freeze it in baggies.

It was the unwanted gift that kept on giving. I went from being starved to willingly starving myself.

When we moved to Georgia, I guess Grandma got tired. To be fair, I’m sure she was tired before she gained custody of me. She worked full time with an hour-long commute through heavy traffic and carried the majority of the household responsibilities thanks to outdated, die-hard gender roles. She also had already been a single mother of three for a lifetime before me. I digress.

When we got to Georgia, Grandma no longer made regular meals. I was left to fend for myself, but the combination of not knowing how or what to cook and developing a female body alongside a fat shaming society took its toll.

I grew up in the 80s and 90s. I heard the men in my life criticize women for being fat all the time.

I watched the women in my life pinch their sides, push away plates, skip meals, and lament in mirrors and over scales.

I smelled the bulimia in my mother’s breath.

I watched fat shaming women play out on every movie and tv show. I heard it repeated at school.

I quickly learned that the best thing a woman could hope to be was skinny.

Furthermore, throughout my childhood, my own father had frequently described the perfect woman with passion.

“She’s like a-hundred pounds!!!” he would exclaim. Nothing lit up his eyes quite like an attractive, skinny woman.

Dad wanted a woman who was shorter than him… one-hundred pounds or less… long hair. Preferably Hispanic. Big boobs. Big butt. And nothing like me…

When I was fifteen years old, I felt fat at 5’6 and 115 lbs. Plus, I was blonde and pale. More on body trauma in another blog. I’m getting off point.

Once in Georgia, I would begin the day by skipping breakfast. And then… I would skip lunch too. I had paid lunch through the government because my grandmother was my guardian and not my parent, so I came up with the genius idea to sell my lunch to someone who had to pay cash at a discount.

I would go through the line, collect my lunch, and give it to someone for fifty cents. They would get to keep their change, and I would have just enough to buy an ice cream cone.

It goes without saying that I didn’t understand calories at the time. It was 1999. I thought eating less meant weighing less. To me, an ice cream cone was better than a whole plate of cafeteria food.

And bonus points I didn’t have to see myself as a girl with an eating disorder because I was, in fact, eating.

The logic of a teenage mind, right?

Then, when I would get home and there would be nothing to eat. Not going to lie… I banked on that. I knew if I could starve until school ended, then I would have no choice but to starve once I got home.

Sometimes my grandpa made chicken tacos or pizza. The chicken tacos were about four or five nuggets, a slice of cheese, and a tortilla, microwaved. The pizza was an English muffin with cheese, sliced pepperoni, and, sauce toasted. And sometimes he would take me to Taco Bell when I asked. But mostly, the fridge was full of food that I didn’t know what to do with and tasted horrible. There was no shortage of air sealed plastic bags of meat.

One time, I was very hungry, so I explored the entire fridge and freezer to no avail. I was so desperate, I pulled those air-sealed bags out to inspect them more closely. Perhaps there was something I could do something with. I quickly realized I couldn’t.

I didn’t know how to cook, and I did not want to learn from my grandma. The few times I tried, she just complained and criticized everything I did until I left the kitchen… and then she complained about that as well. How she couldn’t cook with me because I wouldn’t stay in the kitchen.

By seventeen, I couldn’t tell you much about food, but I could tell you how to ignore hunger.

And I could tell you how I hated my body.